Introduction

Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, a large, hairy, humanlike creature believed by some people to exist in the northwestern United States and western Canada. Sasquatch is variably described as a primate ranging from 6 to 15 feet (2 to 4.5 metres) tall, standing erect on two feet, often giving off a foul smell, and either moving silently or emitting a high-pitched cry. Footprints have measured up to 24 inches (60 cm) in length and 8 inches (20 cm) in width. Some people credit the British explorer David Thompson with the first discovery of Sasquatch footprints, in 1811. Since then, several people have claimed to have found such footprints or to have seen Sasquatch, and some have provided purported documentary evidence. However, scholars and scientific researchers have pointed out that no investigator has produced a physical body or other verifiable evidence, and they do not recognize Sasquatch’s existence. Through this project we try to explore the given datasets (Bigfoot Sightings, County Data and County Geography Location) to find out what social/economic/geographic/climatic/political characteristics of a US county are associated with Bigfoot sightings. Look for if any trends are there in the number of reported Bigfoot sightings over time and is there a common narrative of a common physical description of Bigfoot. The Bigfoot Sightings file (bigfoot.csv) includes descriptions of the sightings, location, latitudes, longitudes, dates and other details. The County Data file (county_data.csv) includes county and states names, income and population data for all US counties. The County Geography Location file (county_geo.zip) includes geography location data for all US counties.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sasquatch

nltk data path: /Users/soubhik1c/nltk_data
Found already downloaded nltk data punkt.zip, maxent_ne_chunker.zip, averaged_perceptron_tagger.zip, stopwords.zip, words.zip

This map tells the Bigfoot sightings occurred within the contiguous US. Each dot represents a sighting, and we see a dense area around the north west, north and a bit towards the east of the country. All these parts of the country have forest areas where Bigfoot is said to typically settle in. We notice that the middle part of the country where its relatively hotter climate has sporadic sightings.

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Make this Notebook Trusted to load map: File -> Trust Notebook

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This map helps to solidify our earlier observations. This is a map where we see the number of sightings in each county of the US. The darker the region, the more sightings there have been recorded. We see the maximum number of sightings have been in the counties of the state of Washington. We see that there have been sightings in areas that aren’t particularly densely populated. In areas of maximum sightings, the climate is relatively and generally colder, particularly in Washington which could help explain the huge, fleshy and furry appearance of Bigfoot. Also, to note, the coastal regions like California, Florida, the East Coast states have experienced minimal sightings.